


Secret Admirer

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Secret Admirer, Valentine's Day, like you don't know from the tags, who could it be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 13:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12772377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: As Valentine's Day approaches, Cisco keeps getting amazing gifts from a secret admirer. But is he prepared for the truth about who it is?Now with a schmoopy epilogue!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the NaNo prompt, "Son of a bitch, it's you."

They all stood around the table in the cortex, studying the bright red candy box.

Barry picked up the card. “To Cisco,” he read. “From a secret admirer.” He looked up. “That’s not ominous at all.”

“It was delivered to the police station, not here or your house,” Iris said. “So they know your name and that you sometimes help the cops.”

“Do you think there’s a tracker on it?” Barry wondered. “Like they’re trying to find out your home address? Or what if they suspect that you’re Vibe?”

“The cops looked over it thoroughly,” Iris said. “X-ray and everything.”

“And, hey, I vibed it too, because I’m not actually a moron,” Cisco said. “All I got off the box was the fight that the girl who packed it had with her girlfriend and the hot threesome the postal carrier had with his neighbors last night.” At their looks, he spread his hands. “I do not control this stuff, you guys.”

“According to the shop, it was an online order,” Caitlin reported. “Paid by a prepaid gift card.”

Iris looked up, eyes bright. “Is there an email address attached to the order?”

“Yes, but it was a dcmail address. Anyone can get one of those. And it was Ciscos_Secret_Admirer, so I think it’s pretty clear it was created just for this.”

“Okay, that’s really ominous,” Barry said.

“Orrrrrrr … ” Cisco said, “it’s Valentine’s Day in a week. Maybe I actually have a secret admirer who sent me candy because they think I’m sweet.” He ripped the plastic off the box, pulled it open, and selected a bonbon.

“Cisco!” Iris said, half-laughing. “You’re eating it?”

“Why not?” he said, with his mouth full of chocolate. “It’s my favorite kind. Want some?”

“Oh my god, no! Caitlin, come on, help me out. I can’t believe you’re not at least giving him the stink eye.”

“Actually,” Caitlin said, “I don’t see the harm. It’s fully packaged, from a reputable shop that shipped it directly. The police station examined it once when it arrived there, and Cisco vibed on it himself. All indications are it’s just a gift from a secret admirer, like it says. Why shouldn’t he eat his own candy?”

 _“Thank_ you,” Cisco said, and held up his hand for a high five, which was delivered. “Want some?”

“Oh, no, no, it’s yours.”

* * *

Over the next few days, regular as clockwork, more gifts arrived from his secret admirer. A giant teddy bear. A bottle of wine. A bouquet of roses. All of them ordered online, delivered to the police station, and impossible to vibe on.

Cisco got a lot of ribbing from the guys on the force, but he would grab his new present and say, “You’re all haters because you slobs ain’t getting shit.” He flicked his fingers over the three dozen yellow, orange, and red roses, grinning broadly. “And it takes a real man to like flowers.”

One day, the present was just a folded-up sheet of paper, which was kind of a let-down after everything else. Cisco opened it and let out a noise somewhere between a yelp and a moan.

“What? What is it?”

He looked up, starry-eyed. “They gave me a hundred dollar Steam gift card. Shit. This person totally gets me.”

* * *

Two days before Valentine’s Day, Cisco bounced around his lab, humming. His presents usually turned up around noontime, so he’d fallen into the habit of running out for lunch to one of the places near the police station.

He’d had a rough year since calling it quits with Cynthia. She’d been the first person he’d ever thought could be _The One_ , and it had been a horrible shock to realize that someone being _The One_ didn’t mean the universe - or in this case, the multiverse - was going to just hand them an Everything-Works-Out card. Now she was the one that got away, and Cisco had spent the year feeling like shit because he couldn’t make it work. A string of terrible dates and a soulless one-night stand had also left him feeling like he’d lost his only chance at love, like the world was cold and grey and devoid of the possibility of happiness.

This secret admirer business had buoyed his spirits, though. Okay, he had a tragic love story in his past now, but it didn’t mean romance couldn’t be right around the corner with someone else. Maybe, right?

Maybe sounded awfully good to him at the moment.

He was so busy thinking about what might be next - something sexy maybe? - that he knocked over his oil can. Of course, the loose cap came off and the contents went everywhere.

He yelped, swore, and got to work cleaning the oil up, which took forever. Then when he went back to his calculations, he found that “everywhere” had included his entire precious stash of dry-erase markers. He could “liberate” another box from the cop shop later (Joe always sighed, “Singh is gonna arrest you one day and I won’t even stop him”) but he needed one now.

He went up to Caitlin’s lab. She didn’t use them like he did, but she had her own little stash, in fun colors, too.

She was hunched over a microscope, lips pursed, tap-tap-tapping a pen.

“Dry erase markers?” he said.

“Top left drawer,” she said without looking up.

He tugged open one of the drawers at her desk and scanned the contents. No markers. He realized it was the top right drawer and was about to close it when something caught his eye.

A prepaid gift card.

He frowned at it.

Why would Caitlin have a prepaid gift card for - holy shit. _Five hundred dollars?_

Maybe it was in case she forgot her wallet. Maybe this was some weird budgeting hack she’d read about. Maybe she …

Ordered stuff online.

He reached in and picked it up. On the backside was a post-it, with notations in Caitlin’s neat handwriting. He read through the list.

Candy store.

Flower shop.

Novelty stuffed-animal website.

Fancy wine store.

The Steam website.

The incredible bakery by her house.

His favorite fancy-pants restaurant.

“Cisco,” Caitlin called out. “Did you find it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure did.”

When he turned, she had lifted her head from the microscope. The guilty look on her face erased his last doubt that the card he held had any alternate explanation.

“I - ” she said in a very small voice. “I said the top left.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “It’s you.”

He sat looking at the gift card, conscious of a weird, deflated feeling in his chest. A knot of something he couldn’t quite identify.

“I - ” she said, and stopped.

He looked up at her - one of his best friends. Someone who’d been right there for him at all his worst points, like he’d been for her.

Someone who’d spent the whole past week - no, knowing her, the whole past month, at least - putting time and energy and thought and a not-inconsiderable amount of money into showering him with gifts and affection, and seeing him bounce and smile around Star Labs without claiming any credit.

Her head had drooped down, and her shoulders were folded in tight.

“Hey,” he said softly.

She said, “Look, I -”

He held the card up. “This? Was super sweet, Caitlin. Thank you.” He set it down by her computer and went to give her a quick hug. “You knew how rough this V-Day was going to be and you wanted to give me some happy buzz. You’re the best, you know that?”

She was still sitting on her chair, chin tipped up, eyes big.

He kissed her cheek. “Seriously. This has been so much fun, these presents. And they were amazing. Thank you.”

“You - you’re welcome,” she mumbled.

“Look, I’m about to go grab lunch and stop by the station for - ” He laughed. “Well, you know what, don’t you? You wrote down Cameron’s Bakery - I’m guessing cupcakes? Maybe cookies?”

She nodded like a bobble-head doll. “Cupcakes. Red velvet cupcakes.”

“All right. So I’ll bring those back, and we can share, and hey, you know what? I’m grabbing your lunch, too.”

“N-no. That’s okay, I -”

“You’ve been giving me a lot this week, least I can do is pick you up your favorite sandwich, right?”

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed. “See you in a little bit.”

He went downstairs for his wallet and breached out to a handy alley near the station. He wavered between going there first or grabbing the food, but her favorite sandwich place was five blocks in the other direction. He headed for the station.

“Finally, you’re here!” Iris said. She’d been at the station all morning, reading through case files from about the 1940s that weren’t yet digitized. “I’ve had to practically throw my body on today’s present.” With a dirty look to the desk sergeant, she handed Cisco a dark green box with swirly silver script.

“Come on,” the sergeant mumbled. “We all know what a Cameron’s Bakery box looks like.”

“Well, you can go buy your own,” Cisco said, forcing cheer. “This one’s mine. Thanks for protecting it, Iris.”

She gave him a quizzical look. “Aren’t you going to open it and see what’s inside?”

“I’m afraid of a stampede,” he joked.

Iris didn’t laugh. “You okay? I thought you loved that place.”

He traced his finger over the lettering. “I do. But I need food-food right now, too.” He waved at her with the box and went on his way, wondering if Iris or Barry had been in on it. But no, after their initial skepticism, they’d been into it, cooing over the presents and speculating on identities.

Why hadn’t he told her? “Oh, guess what, craziest thing - it’s Caitlin!”

Maybe because he still had that weird knot of he-didn’t-know-what in his chest.

He couldn’t deny that it had been exciting to have a mystery admirer. Who didn’t love that? Sure, there was the risk they would be someone he wasn’t attracted to. But he’d at least known that someone was attracted to him, coming off a year where he didn’t feel lovable or even sometimes likeable.

But hey. Come on. She was one of his very best friends. She liked him enough to think all this up, just to see him smile. Actually, now that he thought about it, maybe he should have figured on it being someone who knew him really well, and that would have narrowed the field down hard.

He looked at the box of cupcakes in his hand.

She’d brought him a cupcake for his birthday once, during the terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad nine months they’d spent between the explosion and Barry waking up. This exact cupcake, in fact, red velvet from Cameron’s Bakery.

Would he have figured it out then? Or would it have passed right over his head like all the other hints?

Hadn’t he been saying this whole time how perfect these gifts were? How well his secret admirer got him? She knew his favorite kind of chocolates, his favorite wine, how much he dropped on Steam every year.

She’d even heard him once, years ago, talk about how much he’d like to be wooed someday. That everyone expected the guy to do all the wooing in straight relationships, and while he loved doing it, how cool it would be for a girl to do the whole showering-him-with-stuffed-animals-and-flowers thing sometime.

He paused across the road from the sandwich place, checked the oncoming traffic, and jaywalked without compunction.

The thing that stung so strangely - the thing that made him list all the reasons it was so awesome, like he was trying to convince himself to appreciate it - was that here and there over the years, he’d wondered about Caitlin. You know. Like that.

And if she’d been his secret admirer in a romantic way - if all those gifts and surprises were wooing and not just a friend knowing exactly what would make him happy - that would have been …

Well. Honestly, it would have been pretty cool.

He’d had a little crush on her when they first met, but she’d been with Ronnie. The crush had softened into friendship, but the friendship still had a little crushy tinge from time to time. But “from time to time” always seemed to be bad timing.

They’d been friends nearly seven years, through thick and thin. Oh, so much thin. All that time - surely any diem they might have carpe’d was long gone.

Right?

He frowned at the familiar signboard with the specials of the day, and went to stand in line. When he ordered - “chicken salad, with just a little bit of honey mustard” - the worker wrote “Caitlin” on the wrapper without even checking. On autopilot, he grabbed her a bottle of iced tea and himself a bottle of soda.

With the bag swinging from his wrist and the bakery box in his other hand, he found an alley and breached back into his lab, where he dropped everything on his table in a jumble.

The roses sat in a vase on one of his work tables. For some reason, he just stared at them for several minutes.

She’d gotten everything else dead on. Perfect, down to the squashiness of the giant teddy bear, which now was the best gaming chair he’d ever had. But the flowers -

He did like flowers. But his picks were sunflowers, or blue daisies, not roses especially. Why had she gotten him roses?

Didn’t rose colors have special meanings? It would be just like Caitlin to encode her posies. He pulled out his phone and looked it up.

Yellow - friendship, joy, warmth. Okay, that made sense.

Orange - passion, energy. Oh. Uh. Hey. Well, maybe that referred to him, to all his passion and energy for, um, saving the city on a daily basis.

But red? Everyone knew what red roses meant.

He reached out and pulled one of the red roses from the vase. The water dripped cool into his palm and ran down his wrist. He rolled the stem between thumb and forefinger a moment, and then grabbed the bag of their lunches and took both flower and food with him upstairs.

She sat at her computer, the gift card in hand, staring at the screen. Across the top was the logo of his favorite restaurant, and underneath that, the reservation tab.

“You waited this long to make a reservation?” he asked. “For Valentine’s day?”

She jumped and minimized the screen with a laugh that sounded fake. “No, of course not. I made it a month ago. I was just checking on it. Thinking about canceling. That was supposed to be the big reveal, after all, but now it’s just going to be a meal.”

“Caitlin,” he said, suddenly afraid.

“But!” she said brightly. “You know what. It is your favorite restaurant, and you should get to eat there. So the reservation’s in your name, and they have my credit card on file, so you go, okay? By yourself, or - or take whoever you’d like. Have a lovely time. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

She was so bright and chipper. She looked like she was about to shatter.

He set the food down next to her computer and pulled an extra chair over. “What if I want to take you?”

She looked away. “Don’t you think that would be a little strange? Around all the happy couples?”

“That was the original plan,” he pointed out. “Two BFF’s, eating a nice meal together on Valentine’s Day. Right?”

Still not looking at him, she fussed with her fingernails, picking at her pink nail polish.

He laid the rose over her keyboard and watched her go still.

“Or was it?” he said. “You gave me red roses. Sure, it took me a little while to catch on to that, but everybody knows what red roses mean.”

“Cisco - ”

“What was your plan?” he asked. “You were going to invite me - I’m guessing a card with time and place, delivered to the station tomorrow?”

She nodded.

“And then you were going to be there at the table and ta-daaa! And then what? How did you picture this going?”

She looked at the rose for a long moment. Then she reached out and picked it up, touching the velvety petals to her cheek. 

“I - I was going to follow your lead,” she almost whispered into the bloom.

He let out a huff of breath. “My lead. Like, where I immediately jumped to the conclusion that those were all platonic, friendly secret admirer gifts you were showering down on me? A conclusion that was clearly mistaken.”

“I knew it was a risk. I knew that even though it seemed like your heart was mending and you were ready to get out there again, I might be wrong. And even if I wasn’t wrong about that, there was every chance you’d be disappointed that it was just me. But - ” She put the rose down. “I wanted to try. Because so many times over the years, I’ve thought ‘what if,’ and I wondered if you thought that too.”

He started to lean in, and she pulled back so hard her chair rolled a couple of inches. “Please,” she said. “I already know you think of me as strictly a friend. Don’t pity me on top of it. Just let me handle it on my own, okay?”

“You wanna know why I was so weird earlier?” he said. “Because I was trying - oh my god, I was trying so hard! - to be happy that I had a friend who cared about me that much, to put that much work into giving me an amazing Valentine’s Day week. But there’s this little part of me that’s also thought from time to time, ‘what if’ and that part of me wanted you to be wooing me, Caitlin. Courting me. Is that what you were doing?”

Very slowly, she nodded. Her eyes were big again, like they had been earlier when he’d thanked her for being such a good friend.

He brushed his fingers down her jaw and leaned in again. This time, her lips met his.

It was light, tentative, questioning. But it was also the sweetest kiss he’d had in a long time.

“Okay,” he said softly after a long minute, leaning back. “So. I’ll meet you at my favorite restaurant at eight pm on Valentine’s Day. You’re going to wine and dine me, and then we’ll see this where this goes. How’s that sound?”

“That sounds amazing,” she said, and kissed him again. In her kiss, he could taste a world of possibilities, opening up.

FINIS


	2. Anniversary Date

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the Tumblr prompt "I'd go anywhere with you"

“Oh hey,” Barry called out when Caitlin came back upstairs. “Cisco left that for you.”

He pointed at her keyboard, where a red rose and a folded note waited. She picked it up and read, _Meet me outside at eight. Don’t ask where we’re going - it’s a SURPRISE!_ She breathed in the warm rose-scent and smiled to herself, then checked the clock - seven fifty-five.

“Am I on duty tonight?” she asked. They tried to have an even, balanced schedule of who was on patrol and who was running the computers in the cortex and who had the night off, but they were always trading nights back and forth for various obligations, and it got hard to keep track sometimes.

“Nope,” Barry said. “And neither is Cisco.”

Barry had been surprisingly sanguine about his two best friends suddenly starting up a relationship. Sometimes he still looked at them like he was trying to figure out how two and two made five, but mostly he gave them space and didn’t side-eye when they held hands, and only teased them a little when he caught them kissing.

Caitlin frowned at him. “Who’s going to run the mikes?”

Iris came in. “I’m subbing in. Hi!”

“Iris!” Caitlin ran to give her a hug. She had missed the other woman since she’d gone back to CCPN a few weeks ago.

She knew Iris didn’t regret the multi-year sabbatical she’d taken to help out at Star Labs, but her friend had also desperately missed journalism. Now that she was back on the reporter’s beat, there was something more centered, more content about her. Of course, she did still step in at Star Labs when needed.

Iris pointed at her note. “Special request from Cisco. You are to have a wonderful date and not think about Star Labs for even a second.”

“Come hell or high water,” Barry added.

“Okay but if High Water really does come around,” Caitlin started.

“We will handle him,” Iris finished for her, hooking her arm around her husband’s waist. “Go! You’re going to be late!”

Caitlin hugged them both and ran to turn off her computer and grab her bag.

Cisco sat on the hood of her car, rubbing his hands together. “Hey there,” he said, kissing her hello. “Ready to go?”

“Sure.”

He waited, grinning at her. “Not gonna pepper me with questions about our surprise destination?”

“I’d go anywhere with you,” she said.

His grin softened, and he took her face in his hands to press a kiss to her lips. “Awwww, honey, I’d go anywhere with you too.”

She kissed him back and said, “Okay, but really, where are we going?”

He laughed out loud. “Nuh-uh, it’s a surprise, I said.”

“Are we going in the car? Through a breach?”

“It’s close enough we can walk,” he said, taking her hand. “And I see you mentally cataloguing all the places around here. Stop that.”

She wrinkled her nose at him.

“So. Do you know what today is?”

“March the fourteenth.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “The one-month anniversary of our first date.”

“That’s right,” she said, smiling to herself. How like Cisco to celebrate one month.

“And Pi Day, of course, and also a holiday called Steak and a Blowjob Day.”

She stopped smiling and arched her brow at him. “I’ve heard of it.”

Not that she disliked giving head - quite the opposite. But being expected to perform on the basis of a stupid made-up holiday rubbed her the wrong way.

He grinned easily at her as if he knew what she was thinking. “I know. I know. It’s supposed to be the guy’s version of Valentine’s Day where we get what we want, namely grilled meat and our dick sucked. But I enjoyed the hell out of my Valentine’s Day, and you know what? You did all the wooing. So - ”

They turned the corner and he held out his hand. “Ta-da.”

Caitlin’s favorite steakhouse sat across the road from them, all lit up. Cisco waved at the doorman, who waved back. “I made a reservation,” he said.

“A reservation,” she said. “You?”

“Baby, you know I know what you like.” He tugged her close and kissed her again. “So we’re gonna go there for steak.” He rubbed noses with her and dropped his voice to a sensual purr. “And then we’re going home for pussy.”

She let out a burble of laughter. He laughed along with her, because they both knew he enjoyed eating her out as much as she enjoyed getting eaten. “Sound good?”

She kissed him firmly. “Sounds great. Come on.” She tugged at his hand. “I’m starving.”

FINIS


End file.
